Our efforts during the daytime were pretty non-existent but during the evening we went to the Truck & Tractor Pulls at nearby Skagit Speedway. We arrived 40 minutes prior to the scheduled kickoff and lines were very long at the admission gate. That might have been because they let people pay with credit cards or cash in all the booths and their communication speed of their credit card readers is almost glacial.

We eventually got past the gate. We have been to this racetrack before and we know their seating is terrible. The seating planks are only about six inches wide and, probably due to rough weather and negligence, are laced with buttock-piercing slivers and have all the flexibility of cast iron. We brought in Peggy’s nifty grandstand chair and some ass pads for me, fully acknowledging the torturous seating available. The chair works very well but their isn’t enough padding transportable for my rather wide bottom. About an hour into the show I noted that a thought kept coming to me – MY BUTT HURTS!

The tractor pulls started out with little bitty lawnmowers and hobby farm tractors dragging mini-sleds and was quite boring. The announcer was incapable of telling us who was driving the tiny things but we did note that all of the lawnmowers were owned by the same person and driven by his offspring.

Then the stock, or mostly stock, trucks started pulling a much larger sled which moves greater amounts of load onto the sled as the truck goes further. There was much black smoke and whirling of turbochargers except in one case where there was black, then white, smoke because a part went out the side of the engine block right about time the load got serious. None of the diesel trucks could muster a “full pull” which is 300 feet.

Then some tractors with enormous engines hooked onto the sled and started the sled really moving. The tractors were quite a bit more powerful and substantially quicker than those utilized for, say, mowing corn or baling hay. Full pulls became regular after this point. Several of the bastardized rigs had in excess of 1,000 horsepower and two rigs were really fancy, one with three big alcohol engines and another with four. They produced prodigious amounts of both noise and smoke. It was a good, noisy meeting of the Church of Internal Combustion. Washington is not quite as big of a nanny state as California so folks can both smoke carcinos and buy beer right in the stands. It ended up being a big, fun, noisy time for all and much fuel was consumed yet no crops harvested.